evening redness

I have been complaining today on Twitter about having to order my fall textbooks now. It feels too early. More to the point, I know what I am teaching in terms of topic/course numbers, but I have not fully worked out what material to cover. I think about material intermittently, but of course never write anything down. Even if I had written things down, they would be likely of little use when it comes time to put the course together. So, instead of doing some heavy research and giving the matter as much thought as I would like, I tend to wind up ordering books based on how much we can read in a given week and in the term overall and how much books will cost students (under $100 is necessary, under $80 ideal).

So here is my class on History after History, a 3000 level course that falls under the heading “Topics in Advanced Theory.” I think that this material is all relevant, and is all in my wheelhouse, so to speak. That said, I would like some more time to consider. I still can fiddle a lot here, as there is lots of room around the books for other essays (whether I eliminate some of those proposed here or just add). I would think that Haraway would fit here nicely, especially her considerations of myth and animality. Also relevant would be the Paul Gilroy of The Black Atlantic. Both of these thinkers would provide a nice corrective to the whiteness and maleness of this reading list. I know nothing about postcolonial scholarship in this area, but assume it must be out there. That would help as well, so I will see what I can do between now and August, when the decisions about what to read have to become final.

ENGL 3116-002: Topics in Advanced Theory

History after History

“History” has never been “the past,” but a way of thinking about the past. Rather, it has been a way of connecting the past, present, and future in the context of the human so that the passage of time takes on meaning. We call this meaning “progress.” But if humanity ceases to progress, or if it recognizes that such progress is a human construction and not a natural fact, what happens to history? Surely events will continue to happen, but will they still mean in the same way?

This class considers what posthistory looks like. We will study several accounts of the dominant form of historical thinking, that of GWF Hegel, and then consider the strengths, shortcomings, and alternatives to this manner of thinking. Walter Benn Michaels and Francis Fukuyama will provide the Hegelian point of view. Giorgio Agamben will provide the critique of that point of view. Michel Foucault and Vilém Flusser will provide philosophical, and Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson speculative/fictional, alternatives to that point of view.

Evaluation will be based on short response papers and a final project.

Possible Reading List:

Giorgio Agamben: The Open

Walter Benjamin: “On the Concept of History”

Octavia Butler: Parable of the Talents

Vilém Flusser: Post-History

Francis Fukuyama: “The End of History?”

Michel Foucault: The Archaeology of Knowledge & “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

Fredric Jameson: “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”

Walter Benn Michaels: The Shape of the Signifier

Friedrich Nietzsche: from Thus Spoke Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morals

Kim Stanley Robinson: Red Mars